by Liz Lochhead
MARY. Hogg was a brother to me…
BYRON. Ah! Fraternal love! I’ve heard of such things.
MARY. Surely Shelley did not trust you with such a secret?
BYRON. Hush-hush, of course not. Claire did, didn’t she – now, it was not unkindly meant, oh, don’t break my confidence to you and chide her. It was in an unguarded, not to say unclothed moment…
MARY. You cannot know how cruel you are! He was Shelley’s friend. Shelley and I don’t believe in… I wanted to show Shelley I felt the same as he did about freedom.
BYRON. Goodness, Mary, what’s to get in such a tush about? If you loved Hogg, what’s to shock? Surely it was nothing more than the revolutionaries declaring independence from the laws the rest of us humble mortals have to live by – or some of us frolic to flout! Surely it was merely the embracing of your own published principles, Mary Godwin?
MARY. How could a libertine like you understand? It was a noble experiment!
BYRON. The dissection of the affections! The analytical, anatomical dismantling of the human heart!
MARY. We wanted a new way to live. Can’t you understand that?
BYRON. Oh yes… Intellectually I can conceive of it, Mrs Shelley. But there is something hideously unnatural in such a cold-blooded, put-together passion, is there not? I cannot believe it can have been a very pretty thing in practice. And I’m all for practice… making perfect.
Mary! Mary, I am a simple soul at heart! None of your rational splits between the heart and the head for me. None of your cold-blooded laboratories of sexual relations, just the head, the heart, the body and soul!
MARY. You have no soul!
BYRON. – The healthy mind in the healthy body! But I do have a soul, Mary. A blackened, burnt-out cinder of a soul perhaps, may it rot in hell. And it has done, it has done.
Don’t say you’ve swallowed Shelley’s fallacy of freethinking? So, you’re free to agree with your Atheist, allowed to assent to uniting yourself with your Dissenting Angel…
But I, Mary, am like all blasphemers, a true believer! A libertine who breaks the code, but is good and glad it exists to rupture. The Lord knows, were it not for legitimate married love, there would not be a convention worth outraging!
MARY. You are a heartless seducer!
BYRON. Not heartless, just… faint-hearted sometimes. Where it could really… make a difference. Oh, I do tumble the occasional dollymop, that I do freely admit, do the odd bit of hobnobbing below stairs, and below the greasy petticoats of scrubbing scullery wenches – I’m not snobbish!
But it’s all just to kill time, Mary.
MARY. Are you trying to make me pity you? For –
BYRON. Not at all! No, Mary, it is not that I am half-hearted in my love affairs. Just that recently… Well, you know all about that, all England knows all about that… recently I have been rather half-witted about who I chose – but do we ever really choose who we truly love?
MARY. Your sister!
BYRON. Half-sister, Mrs Shelley. But yes, I love my sister Augusta. Too much to subject that love to the warpings of Platonics. Frustrated love perverts, produces monsters! But as for you, Mary, and Shelley, and Hogg, and Claire, with your frigged-up intellectual notions of passion!
Oh, it is not love which is dead in my heart, Mary, but hope merely.
Like all highly coloured comedians, I do take a dim view of the world.
MARY. And that is your real sin, Lord Byron. You do… give up too easily!
BYRON. Do I? You mean if I but bide my time, bonny Mary…?
MARY. I mean you give way to pessimism! It is unforgivable! How can you, in a century which has given us Arkwright… and Owen… and Watt…
MARY and BYRON. The French Revolution?
BYRON. And the Terror, the heads bounding into baskets, the Jacobins, the Girondins, the Sans-Culottes, the Ruin, the Rot, the Reaction! Did not Sweet Shelley’s second honeymoon straddle the charred and blackened corpse of La Belle France? Or didn’t he notice? Or didn’t you notice, Mary-Mary?
MARY. Our eyes were wide open! My Shelley’s no sleepwalking dreamer. He was the first, the only one of his generation quickly to see through Napoleon!
BYRON. Bravo!
MARY. My mother, did you know she travelled to France during the Revolution, she lived in Paris all during…
BYRON. That bloodbath?
MARY. Yes! And she did not give up hope.
BYRON. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Cookbook: ‘You cannot make an omelette without cracking a few skulls.’ Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Dreambook: ‘It’s getting a little better all the time!’
MARY. And should a true poet like Shelley not indulge in dreams and aspirations?
BYRON. Humbug and bubbles, Mrs Shelley! Mary, you are getting good and sick, I know it, of Ariel’s head-in-the-clouds hopefulness. Come on, come down to earth where you belong! Come on, come and curl up with old club-footed Caliban!
Hold for a long moment. Till it almost looks as if she will. She steps a step closer to him. He flicks at her mother’s pendant on her throat.
Come, write that story, and let me tell you, it won’t be made of nebulous ideas, pretty philosophies and pointless, pointless politics!
Everything I write is a Creature who can only live by what he sees, hears, smells, tastes, touches, and grabs, Mrs Shelley. And rather than have him starved and skinny, living on air, I’d have him rich and fat with facts, facts, facts. And any plain fact looked at without flinching is funny. At any rate, one has to laugh. Or doesn’t this one? Don’t you, Mary? I look at you, Mary, and I see someone who is holding it all within. A lovely lady who yet suppresses every gust, every gale, every giggle. Don’t sit on your wit, just to please Shelley.
MARY. ‘Like a sword without a scabbard, it wounds the wearer!’ What good does wit do a woman? Wit in a woman is always sour.
BYRON. So is my sour wit womanish?
I think not, Mary. (Whispers.) I’ll prove it to you…
CLAIRE enters. He hears her and turns.
We’ll have Claire here sign an affidavit! Claire, come here! Kiss me.
She does. BYRON kisses her fully and lewdly on the lips.
Lord, Lord, I think I have found me Polidori’s Vampyre!
You know, Claire, Mary’s virtue is much affronted that there is so much… to-ing and fro-ing between your villa and mine. She does not like to be too near the foul sty or the hot breath of the two-backed beast!
He kisses her again, grabbing her breasts and buttocks and pulling up her skirt.
CLAIRE. Albé! Stop! Stop it! Mary’s here.
BYRON. Not alone, are we not, Mam’zelle Clairmont, and me so mad with lust for you?
CLAIRE. Albé, I mean it, I’m getting vexed! (To MARY.) Polidori came and gave him a sleeping draught. He says we’re wicked, winding each other up so tightly, exciting ourselves so. We’ll forget all this happened. Come away, Albé! It’ll all be better in the morning. Come –
BYRON. Goodnight, Mrs Shelley.
BYRON chases CLAIRE across the stage, catching her, kissing her, laughing, making her shriek. They exit.
Lights change.
Back to widow MARY at her desk, remembering.
MARY. Cold. Cold and lonely. I thought: ‘Go to him, go to Shelley… no! He should come to me!’ I was as far away from him that night… and him only asleep next door, wound round in laudanum dreams and brandy fumes, and poppy scents of incense. But I was as far away from him as I am now. And him drowned and dead for ever.
I lay down. Not to sleep, I did not sleep, nor could I have been said to dream. Not dreaming… I saw him!
The CREATURE’s music begins, a slow throb. She senses him behind her, but does not turn round.
The form he takes – if he is indeed made visible – is shadowy and barely lit.
She goes slowly to and lies down flat on the chaise longue, lies on it as if she is the created one, limp and lifeless. Her eyes are shut. Only her lips move, slowly.
I see him
! A pale student of unhallowed arts, kneeling beside the thing he has put together.
Flash of lightning. MARY sits up as if electrified, speaks out:
It lives! The artist is terrified, and would rush away from his handiwork, horror-stricken. Begins to hope that, left to itself, the spark of life will fade.
Sleeps a deep and dreamless sleep. Awakens.
Behold, standing right by my bedside, looking down at me with yellow, watery, but hungry eyes…
CREATURE’S VOICE. Cry hallelujah, Frankenstein! Sing out. For you have found this, this has found you. It is easy, describe what haunts you. Frankenstein, you have thought of a story. Mary Shelley, you have seized the spark of life. Now write this.
MARY goes to the desk begins to write. MARY writing, the CREATURE’S VOICE and MARY’s voice together –
CREATURE’S VOICE and MARY. It was on a dreary night in November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.
End of Act One.
ACT TWO
Widow MARY with candle, quill, at her writing desk again. She has some letters, opens one, reads. Paces, frets.
MARY. Oh, Percy Florence Shelley, my sweet son, how am I to keep you?
When your grandpapa Godwin, far from supporting us financially, asks us for money just as constantly as he did when Shelley was alive?
And when your grandpapa Shelley threatens he will cut us off without a penny if we bring out your father’s poetic productions posthumous before the world and add, in his eyes, yet more infamy to the family name?
But he should know it. I will collect and edit and bring out in a single volume the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley if it is the last thing I do.
Must write!
When creation goes dead and dull, that’s the time the author has to force himself to put the long hours in and have the faith that sometime soon the spark surely will return.
The Last Man, oh, Mrs Shelley – if you can but keep your courage – this is the book that will make your name, your fame and your fortune.
‘The year is 2073, a slowly spreading plague threatens the very existence of human life on earth. Vernay, the hero of our tale –
The Last Man.’
I’ll live here lonelier than the last woman alive on earth and I’ll write it.
It is so much better an idea than any I ever have had before in all my life.
As for my last monstrosity, my grotesque invention, my scandal, to my surprise my enduring and popular success, no, I didn’t invent you, I didn’t write you, you came unbidden and I wrote you down.
Movement in the shadows.
CREATURE’S VOICE. Wrap yourself in furs, Frankenstein, for soon such ice and cold. No escape, except by the death of you or this.
MARY. I could never think how to kill you. Night after night, I had done with you, only for you to rise again.
I buried you in an avalanche, I had you leap into the smoking crater of a volcano, I burned you to death in a church.
I did not think of drowning you in the ocean…
I mangled you in the workings of a gigantic mill…
I froze you to death in an Arctic storm. But you would not die.
CREATURE’S VOICE. Come, pursue This, chase This, till This shall catch you…
MARY picks up the volume, Frankenstein, opens it at random and reads with a shudder.
MARY. ‘How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch which, with such infinite care I had endeavoured to form? His lips were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was lustrous and flowing, his teeth of a pearly whiteness – these luxuriances merely a more horrid contrast with the watery eyes, that seemed almost the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set… his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips… I could not endure the aspect of the being I had created.’
CREATURE’S VOICE. Frankenstein’s Frankenstein? Why did you make me? This must know.
MARY. Frankenstein’s Frankenstein? Am I? I am! My God! Oh, had I known…
I am responsible.
‘It was on a dreary night in November.’
I wrote that, on a stormy night in June. I was happy then, we were all of us happy then. My most congenial companions and I…
They were my most beloved congenial companions. Most of the time. And if they were not always… then that is my fault, surely?
‘It was on a dreary night in November.’
The book I started on the shores of Lake Geneva that stormy night in June stole me away from the others. Six months later, I was still writing it.
Oh, let the baby cry!
We were back in England then, Shelley and I – with Claire.
It was on a dreary night in December…
Lights change. The desk at which MARY writes is now in England, December 1816.
(The transitions into past time in Act Two happen in an even more fluid fashion.)
Now CLAIRE comes; very, very heavily pregnant and bored.
CLAIRE. Oh, Mary, there you are, still scribbling? Shelley might be back from London soon. Come and I’ll crimp your hair for you. Come and I’ll make you beautiful for your lover coming home.
MARY. Is that what you’ve been doing?
CLAIRE. Making myself beautiful for my lover?
MARY. Crimping your hair!
CLAIRE. There’s no point in me trying to look pretty in this condition. This kicks! Little monster! Honestly, wouldn’t you think there’d be some other way, some better way? No wonder men recoil in horror when they see what they’ve done! So ugly!
MARY. You’re not ugly. How can something so natural be ugly?
CLAIRE. It’s ugly!
MARY. Shelley doesn’t think it’s ugly. Before William was born, when I was first pregnant, with my little girl that died… he used to hold the great globe of my belly as if it were the whole world, and press his face against it.
CLAIRE. Shelley, though, is a man in a million.
Imagine loving a big fat swollen woman!
MARY is trying to go on writing. CLAIRE is lumbering about, bored and clumsy, looking out of the window.
It has rained and rained for three days and nights without stopping. Not a glimmer in the grey sky. And all the flat sodden grey fields just soak it all up! I hate England. I hate the winter. Why did we come back here?
MARY. Because.
CLAIRE. Yes, I know, but why did the summer have to end?
Silence. MARY gets another sentence, half-sentence done, crosses it out, scratching her pen.
I can’t even go out! All the villagers whispering about me behind my back, going in and locking their doors. Anyone would think they’d never seen a pregnant woman before.
MARY. They talk about me too! And Shelley. They don’t understand, so they gossip.
CLAIRE. You don’t care! All you’ve wanted to do ever since we came home is bury yourself in your damned book! Everything’s flat around here. Except my belly.
What are you writing anyway?
Mmm?
CLAIRE snatches a page. MARY tries to grab it. CLAIRE avoids her, reading from the manuscript:
‘His yellow skin… the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was lust… his teeth of a pearly whiteness… more horrid contrast with watery eyes… shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.’
God, Mary, what a truly hideous imagination you have. Where do you get it?
MARY. Give it back!
CLAIRE dodges MARY, reads lucidly another passage:
CLAIRE. ‘Here then, I retreated and lay down, happy to have found a shelter, however miserable, from the inclemency of the season and still more from the barbarity of man.’ Quite!
MARY. Claire…
CLAIRE. Why didn’t I stay there?
MARY. Where?
CLAIRE. In Europe. And follow him? Once his son is born, and I could say: ‘Look, here is what
we made together… that night we made love in the storm.’
MARY. How do you know it’ll be a son?
CLAIRE. Oh, I know. Just as clearly as, that night… I know he loved me!
MARY. Oh, Claire…
CLAIRE. Boring, flat old England. Why did we come back?
MARY. Money.
CLAIRE. Yes, but why did Shelley go to London and leave us here?
MARY. Money.
Silence. MARY writes, having pointedly taken the sheet of filched paper back from CLAIRE. The baby begins to cry.
CLAIRE. Baby’s crying. Ma-ma, Ba-ba wants you! I’ll get him, you’re too busy.
CLAIRE comes back with the crying baby, rocking him in her arms.
There, Willmouse pet. Ssh, where’s a lamb? There’s your mummy. Mama doesn’t love him, does she? Not properly. Mama loves her dream child better, hmm?
Who wants Auntie Claire to give him a little brother to play with?
MARY. Cousin.
CLAIRE. Cousin, brother, what’s the difference round here? Oh… Mary… sometimes I’m so frightened.
MARY. What’s the use of being frightened?
CLAIRE. Is it terribly, terribly sore?
MARY. It’s a pain that one forgets.
SHELLEY, crying, bursts into the room. He is dishevelled, sobbing. MARY leaps to her feet.
Dear God, Shelley, look what you made me do!
Spilt ink!
She holds up a page stained with red ink like blood.
SHELLEY is sobbing his distress, and holds out a copy of The Times, December 1816.
CLAIRE. What is it? What is in the newspaper?
MARY. Give it to me!
SHELLEY. No!
CLAIRE grabs it, reads.
CLAIRE. ‘Tuesday December 10th… Mrs Harriet Shelley, a respectable female far advanced in pregnancy, was taken from the Serpentine River and brought home to her residence in Queen Street, Brompton, having been missed for nearly six weeks… She had a valuable ring on her finger, a want of honour in her own conduct is supposed have led to this fatal catastrophe…’
MARY is trying to reach out for SHELLEY.
SHELLEY. Leave me alone!
MARY recoils, freezes. SHELLEY exits. CLAIRE looks at MARY, appalled, and goes after him.
Lights change. Back to widow MARY again.
CREATURE’S VOICE. Who made This? Who did This?
